Adrian Chiles, a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist, has described how his vegetable patch has become a "chard jungle" after he sowed more seeds following a disappointing crop last year. Now, he says, it is chard for breakfast, lunch and supper.
From too little to too much
Chiles explains that last year there was too little chard, probably because he did something wrong. This year, he sowed more, but the crop underwhelmed him again. So he sowed still more, throwing around seeds of as many varieties as he could get hold of.
He then went to Croatia for most of August, where chard is plentiful. On the Adriatic coast, it comes with every meal. In Croatian, it is called blitva, which Chiles notes is oddly enough the sound his belly makes when he eats too much of it.
A neighbour's kindness backfires
While he was away, his neighbour kindly watered his garden. Chiles says he almost wishes she hadn't. His chard patch is now a jungle, featuring stems of many colours and leaves of all shades of green. Some leaves are so big that, if he were naked, they would cover not just his bits but his whole lower half. The stems are thick enough to serve as lethal weapons.
Chiles recounts meeting a woman in Split who was so sick of chard she got angry at the mere mention of it. She was the cousin of the wife of a famous Serbian footballer, and she wrote pop songs for a living. As she forked chard off her plate onto his, she spat out the word blitva as if it were a profanity.
Chard for all
Now, Chiles has chard for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as chard for the freezer, chard for friends and more for enemies. He concludes: "I do love chard, but too much chard is hard."
